A DISCUSSION WITH BILLY FLEMING
DESIGN AND THE GREEN NEW DEAL
NO.12
BILLY FLEMING
DATUM
20
Datum had the opportunity to contribute to a panel discussion with Billy Fleming along with NOMAS ISU chapter, and some ISU Department of Architecture faculty members, after his lecture on Design and the Green New Deal. This is a transcription from the panel discussion 2.28.20. Datum: In your lecture and your essay on “Design and the Green New Deal”, you mention that since the Green New Deal is a good opportunity for designers to participate in addressing the climate crisis and become practitioners of care. One of the questions that came around in our discussion was, if at all, do you find the green new deal insufficient in any way, and if so how? And what is the best way to communicate this in order for us as designers to engage in the practice of caring for the ecosystem? Billy Fleming: Yeah, that is a great question. There are all kinds of ways in which I think the Green New Deal is insufficient or at least there are things about it that worry me. The two big ones are that The Green New Deal, HR109 and every other document within GND-world that you can find, have nothing to say about international affairs and foreign policy. And yet, all of the technology
that is higher explicitly or implicitly called out in HR 109—PVs, electric cars, turbines, etc.—that are supposed to be part of electrifying everything in our lives through clean energy, require various minerals and all kinds of other materials that must be mined or extracted from places that we [the US and Global North] have a very long history of treating like Shit! All we do is extract things from them and transfer wealth to ourselves. And when I ask this question within the broader GND-world that I work, I’m always told “oh yes that’s a big problem, but someone else will take care of that.” And so, I remain very nervous that the Green New Deal will become coopted as a weapon for a form of green imperialism... I also worry about its eco-modernist orientation—operating from the position that technology is going to solve most of the climate crisis for us. And I just think, in many ways, this view is hopelessly naive. Technology is NOT going to solve the problems at the core of the Green New Deal for us. And in fact, technology can and probably will make much of this worse, at least in the short-term. This is also where you start to see people leaning into discussions or ideas about geoengineering, as potential solutions to the problem of planetary climate
